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Forum:Transparent Government
While terrorists can bomb buildings and rival nations may wage war, the most dangerous threat to citizens of any nation is their own government. The very definition of a government includes that it is an organization which, within its territory, has an effective monopoly on the use of violence that is used to compell people in the territory to follow the laws the governing organization promulgates. Democracy is widely considered to be the most functional method of guaranteeing protection from an authoritarian government, but this process begins to break down if the members of the governing organzation are allowed to shroud their motives and means behind a veil of secrecy. Opacity is the friend of power-hungry would-be tyrants. Transparency is the friend to the freedom-lover. Why Trust The Government? A key condition to trust on any level is that when the trust that has been given is betrayed, the level of trust is diminished. Similarly, when the trusted party behaves in ways that mask whether or not the conditions that enable trust have been fulfilled or not, this tends to diminish trust. Demands for transparency are fundamentally demands for the ability of common citizens to '''verify' that the government is trustworthy. Citizens should never assume their government has only their well-being in mind. Just as we may trust teenage girls babysitting our children or the charity to which we contribute money to spend that money properly, we are obliged to trust our government, but that trust only goes so far. This trust is predicated on certain conditions, and when those conditions are not fulfilled, the citizens have no obligations to trust. Sometimes there are good reasons to take advantage of someone's trust. Sometimes situations arise where one party must act in a way that deceives a trusting party for the benefit of the latter party. The circumstances of these betrayals, though, must be rare if any trust is to survive. The reasons for such betrayals must be made clear eventually, preferably upon their discovery. Any party who violates these fundamental principles of trust is not entitled to it. National Security The term 'national security' has been used for the greater part of the century to justify gross betrayals of the American people's trust. It continues today. Its use justifies the classification of various documents 'top secret,' secret police, and clandestine operations carried out against sovreign nations and this country's own citizens. The spy games this government carries out, along with the terms 'black ops' and 'secret operative,' have become familiar and comfortable ideas to most people in America. Their existence is accepted as necessary, and their destruction is seen as foolish. The gravest threat posed to this nation is not the documents hidden behind red tape and 'top secret' classifications, locked away in vaults deep within the headquarters of the CIA, FBI, and DoD. It is the vaults. The Transparent Society As technology advances, establishing comprehensive video and audio surveilance of arbitrary areas becomes a cheaper and cheaper project for any organization (including the government). As such programs becomes cheaper, it becomes ''technically feasible to surveil all manner of places including: public streets and parks, the inside of buildings of public companies, the inside of government buildings (like prisons, police stations, and politician's offices), the insides of private homes... There are strong economic incentives to establish surveilance systems. For example, in Britain such systems have proven to be highly effective and extremely cheap ways to reduce crime. Ultimately, it will be political decisions (whether these decisions are made quietly without fanfare or with vigorous public debate) that determine where such surveilance systems will be installed and who will have the right to watch "the feed". Those who believe in the Transparent Society argue that the most important feature of any system of surveilance should be that the government itself should be surveiled and that all feeds the government has access to should also be publically and easily accessbile, as with webcams or in the manner of C-SPAN. Who watches the watchers? Everyone. Further Reading 1. David Brin is the leading thinker on the Transparent Society.g 2. Wikipedia on Brin's Book "The Transparent Society" 3. The US is "indefensible" Former Bush insider Ron Suskind assesses the current state of security and discusses the balance between safety and freedom. (Salon.com, 11 August 2006) :Whichever party's in power, whoever's in the White House, power has a way of aggregating itself, and that's why we need checks here that are agreed-upon, that occur during the intervening period between attacks. After the next attack -- and I think it's a matter of when, rather than if -- then the conversation again becomes one dominated by fear. Conversations dominated by fear almost always have outcomes that we later regret. Category:Government attributes Category:Civil rights